Free Ranging America

Have you ever wondered why there is always steak and chicken at Wall-Mart, and a lot of it? Have you wondered why that is the price? Have you ever wondered where it came from? How the animal was treated and killed?

No? It’s not a surprise to me. They honestly don’t want you to know.

If the animals that are used to feed our nation were brought up the way my grandfather did, then both vegetarians and meat lovers would understand that eating meat does not mean that animals are tortured before processed. My Grandfather bought 100 head of cattle and let them loose on his 7000 acre ranch. Every month or two, we would hunt for a deer or cow. I say hunt because these animals were not caged or confined to any specific area that they could not access themselves. A famous rifle was used.

This time we were hunting deer, for a Christmas dinner. It was “snowing like the dickens” as my grandfather would say. As the deer was shot all I could think about was if it enjoyed its life or if it died in vain, scarred or bearing a burden that it was raised just to die for us the humans at the top of the food chain.

As the meat was quartered, these issues went away, knowing that this animal is praised for feeding us, not just thanked for dying. Big companies like Wall-Mart have hired corporate farmers to produce massive quantities of meat and animal products for us, the consumer. Their methods are completely different. The cow or chicken or pigs do NOT live a happy life, don’t have the freedom of choosing their own feeding spot, choose their own time to eat and drink, to choose their own life! And the kill… the kill is heartless, painful to watch and experience. It makes me think of food as disgraceful to eat, to imagine how it became yours, to care for or NOT care for the millions of animals killed in-humanely for the betterment of Americans, for the bettering of humanity.

There is a simpler way to feed America, so that big corporations don’t get the money and animals don’t get tortured. It may be a rough start but to be sustainable, we will have to comply. That way is family (not factory) farming. That doesn’t mean that everyone has to have a few cows and chickens but maybe just industries changing their ways, hiring more people and extracting produce more ergonomically. If feedlots weren’t feed lots and feed was grown and eaten in the same location and anti-biotics weren’t needed because of the poor living conditions for cows and chickens, the transmission of diseases would be a minimum, and food would be celebrated more. The cows and chickens would be a lot cleaner and they would get exercise and meat would be a lot tastier.

Shop on Amazon and support This I Believe

We receive up to 10% of every purchase you make on Amazon through this link. So do all your holiday shopping here and help support This I Believe!

Top 100 Essays USB Drive

This USB drive contains 100 of the top This I Believe audio broadcasts of the last ten years, plus some favorites from Edward R. Murrow's radio series of the 1950s. It's perfect for personal or classroom use! Click here to learn more.

This week’s essay

Growing up in the former Yugoslavia, lawyer Djenita Pasic enjoyed the peace of her religiously diverse country. But after the fall of communism and the outbreak of the Bosnian War, Pasic was forced to reevaluate her ideas about religion and tolerance. Click here to read her essay.